GA 426 | Deciding When to Use Technology with Lauren Hisey

What problem are you trying to solve for? Right. So I think that it comes into play with strategies, so throwing. Well, it's great to have all this technology and say, hey, we are using this technology. It's not necessarily going to solve the problem. It's kind of like, you know, the chicken for the egg, egg for the chicken.

Today, I'm excited to welcome Lauren Hisy back to the show. Now, Lauren was back on and, well, it's been over 100 episodes ago where we kind of introduced AI and different topics like that and how it related to continuous improvement. And so today we kind of continue that story a little bit, but we start right out of the gate with why it's important for organizations who are trying to improve their processes to not jump straight into technology. And I think Lauren does a really nice job of sort of laying out a framework for some of the steps she might do. As you're working towards a technology solution, we get into things like value stream mapping and Gemba walks and lots of of good stuff. So I think you're going to enjoy this episode. Show notes can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 426. Again gembapodcast.com and look for episode 426. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Lauren, welcome back to the show. How are you?

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.

Yeah. All right. Well, we were back, we were saying it's been a few few weeks ago back in episode 307 and this is 4:26. So it's been a while since we've talked, but good to catch up. Back up with you. So, as you know, Lauren, we like to get things rolling with our guests sharing a quote. So do you have one?

I sure do. My quote I came across this morning, which I thought was great to use today, was the important thing is not to stop questioning by Albert Einstein.

I like it. I like it. All right, well, hey, tell us a little bit about your background, Lauren, and how you first got into all this continuous improvement stuff.

Yeah, I've been so I've been doing continuous improvement for around 13, 14 years now. I started back when I was at AT&T short story, I just had. I got done with my MBA and I wanted something different to do than my current job as a Systems engineer. And AT&T was rolling out their Six Sigma program and then they put Lean on and then about a year later they started using Lean and Six Sigma together. And then when I went out on my own 2019, it's four years ago now, I realized continuous improvement, it's more than just lean and Six Sigma methodologies. It's more about continuous improvement. It's culture. Right. It's about the people, the process. And then I also like to add the technology on top of that as well.

Nice, nice. All right. All right. Well, good stuff. So, yeah, back in episode, what was it? Yeah, 307, we talked about the role of automation and AI and continuous improvement. So if folks haven't listened to that one, that'll be a fun one after this one to bounce back back in time there to episode 307. But let's kind of get going right out of the gate with maybe just a, I don't know, a slightly different twist to that and perhaps why it might be important or prudent, if you will, to just not always jump right to technology when we're seeking out solutions. Why don't you talk a little bit about that?

So a lot of my clients and say, majority of my clients, what I'm finding is they have thrown technology at the. And one of the most important things that's happening is one, they're not having an adoption rate and then they're also seeing how bad the processes really, truly are. So automating a bad process is not a good thing to do. But then they're also losing money, so they're not getting the ROI that they expected out of that technology. And so when it comes down to they may not understand what the true business problem is or what the true business need that they're trying to solve for. Um, so sometimes just going. Starting to go back to the basics of Lean, of Lean and Six Sigma with contingent improvement is where. What problem are you trying to solve for? Right. So I think that's. It comes into, comes into play with strategies. So throwing. While it's great to have all this technology and say, hey, we are using this technology, it's not necessarily going to solve the problem. It's kind of like, you know, the chicken for the egg. Egg for the chicken, I think as well. So without truly understanding what's going on and what the business problem you're trying to solve for the technology is most likely going to fail.

How do you have any? I mean, I don't want to name names or anything like that, but I'm curious if you have any, maybe some general examples of what that, what this might look like.

Yeah, so I have a perfect example is I did have a client that had a homegrown system and Your homegrown ERP is like their thing. They started out as a very small company. So it was at that point it was just cheaper for them to do something homegrown that they help them with their business. But that was, you know, 15 years ago they started doing that and then they started trying to figure out they were, they're having issues. So it was the, it was the client's quotes cash that was part of the first year that they were starting to see problems. And they had all these different customers, they had probably 50 different ways to order different things. They were wholesaler and, and they're realizing that one, they, they didn't know what, where the parts were. They didn't know what the, where the customer order was. They didn't have a good turnaround, say okay, it's going to take you this long to get this, you know, to get, to get these different things. They already started to see this before the supply chain issues that hit with the pandemic. It got even worse as the pandemic happened came. So they decided hey, let's start throwing some RPA or the robotic process automation to fix these issues. But what they're finding out is that it made things worse because the processes were really bad. The technology was old, the new technology wasn't working. With the old technology there are sales folks or even the folks in the, in the warehouse weren't using the new technology the way they should have been. They were going around it and trying to band aid it with you know, manual, with manual stops. So that's one instance of just not throw a solution for us. Let's truly understand what's going on. And so long story short, they had to scrap everything that they were doing and just had to look at current state. They had to do strategy first and look at the current state and then develop a future state. And as they're going through all of this they realized they just needed to revamp the entire system. So they scratched trying to piecemelt and fix the broken processes and just complete um, develop a whole new process.

Got it.

A whole new process redesign.

Okay, so it sounds like you do you mentioned current state, future state. So I'm led to believe. Are you, I mean are you talking about some sort of mapping, value stream mapping or is that, is that what you, you're talking about?

Yeah, exactly, exactly. With this particular customer we had to take them back and do some, do some strategy sessions to first understand what is the business problem they're trying to solve. That was a two day workshop just Understanding what the business problems they are trying to solve. So everybody was on the same page as that. And then the next step was understanding like it was process mapping and workshops to understand and get the walks, understand what the current process look like. But then also on top of that, looking at their different customer Personas that they had because they had, they had quite a different, a few different customers that, that ordered things in a bunch of different ways. And we had to understand that as well. And then leading into that is doing some problem solving. All right, what, what are, where are our top customers? Right. We all know the 80, 20. Right. With an understanding that most 80% of the orders coming in were coming just from these 20% type of customers. So understanding those customer Personas and then building out that future state, so building out that, mapping that out the future state, but then also making sure first that the processes that they're building after the future state were really good. Right. So making sure we had standardization, we had really good data because you can't have, I think for automation or any type of technology work. We have to have really good standardization in the process. We have to have very good understanding of the customer Personas, but also understanding of the, in the data, making sure the data is good, is good quality because you need all that in order to implement the technologies. Once you have all that together, then we can start thinking about, okay, we can achieve our product process automation and then moving into intelligent automation and then of course the machine learning and AI.

How do you go about value stream mapping? Like in this client you were talking about, you mentioned that they're producing some sort of widget.

I assume so they're a wholesaler. So basically they buy things.

Okay, yeah. All right. But they have, it's the same thing. They have material and information that they're working with. Right. So how did you go about the mapping? Because I mean, did you start sort of like in the, on the front office side of it or were you focused more on the, you know, activity side as far as dealing with the product itself or how did you go about that?

So we did, there is. We did that. We did the quote to cash area. So that started that first. Usually a lot of times the first entry point into any type of transformation with a client or even coming up, the client is maybe doing is where's the first entry points. We start to look at the quote to cash area first or maybe in the back end when it comes to accounting or finance and then looking at those processes end to end. So that's I mean it was a very, it is a very undertaking. It's not just like a one, one process. It's, you know, let's look at, do a value stream map. Let's have that high level view, what's the data flows, what's the customer journey. And then for each box in the value stream map, let's map out that detailed process. So, right, understanding what, you know, what are the decision points, what, what's the weighting, what's going on with all that. And then of course enrolling that back up to the value stream map with all the data, with all the different data points that we need for our binary map.

Got it, got it. What about Gemba Walks? I know, I believe you're a fan of them. Right. So how do you weave those into.

Okay, so gimbal walk. So I'd like to do those in person if I can. But you could. I also do them virtually. I have another client where I had last year, our financial client where we did everything virtually there just because nobody was in the office. But the giveaway is just going in and learning what the processes are. And then I always like to, I do that with the different areas of the business and then bring everybody back together to do the end to end. So putting the piece, putting the pieces of the puzzle together. So yeah, Gamblebox is really, or it's not just for process mapping, but I like to also train the leaders to sit there and do gamble walks all the time. Like, you know, like they do it together. Right. Going in and understanding what your frontline workers are going through, what are they doing, how are they feeling, what are the customers feeling, what problems are coming up and that I think Gamma Walks are huge because we get to, we get to listen and understand the problems, but then we also get to understand the feelings, but we also get to see the data flows that are happening as well. Yeah. So it's really important to understand what's going on in there. And that's what creates the communication. It breaks down the barriers and creates transparency between all levels.

Now this client that you were talking about earlier, you went. And so they initially did some sort of automation or whatever it was, and it wasn't working. And so then you sort of took a step back and mapped out the current state, future state, I assume, you know, sort of work towards that future state. Got there now. Now are they a point to where they're ready for some automation or is it fine the way it is?

So a lot of times it really just depends on what tools we have and what needs to be done. A lot of times it's just doing process improvement first and then putting the automation in place after that. Sometimes the automation is part of the solution, but it's still it, but it's helping to fix a problem. Now process improvements are usually easier to do very quickly and then of course some of the automation if it's very simple. So any low hanging fruit for the process we could throw. Automate, you could probably throw automation into solution very quickly. Especially if the data is good and the process is already we're standardizing the process along the way, then that's where I like to see that future. The future state and technology roadmap need to go together. So as road mapping a future state doesn't just stop with process improvements or some type of technology improvements continuously evolving. So what's that roadmap of where you want to get to in the future and then how you continuously improve as technology improves or those new things come out or if you find problems in the current process is if there's a change in the market or a pandemic happens, how do we, you know, how do we fix that and how do we keep evolving as things happen? And usually I just say that, yeah, simple is first and then you just build, then you just build the technology on top of the simple stuff.

Yeah. One of the classic, you know, statements that we would be careful is don't automate waste.

Right, Exactly. Don't automate waste. Exactly. That's a big one.

Yeah, yeah. You know, I wonder if we could maybe as we're kind of wrapping things up here, there's a lot of different technology out there and it can be overwhelming, you know, even for me, you know, and I know a little bit about it, but I'm no expert in all these different fields, but there's rpa, there's AI, there's machine learning, this hyper automation and so on and so forth. Could you maybe give us a crash course on just like some of the, you know, at a high level? Like what are some of the different options for technology out there for those companies that are, like you said, at that point to where it could add value and they're not automating their waste.

Right. So for rpa, that's usually it's simple, the simplest automation. Right. So automating mundane tasks or simple tasks. So something as simple as data entry. So if you get an email request from our client or even a fax request, because a lot of the fax stuff coming in nowadays is probably Going to be digital anyways or you know, something coming off a website. Creating the automation to do that data entry first and then makes it a lot easier. It takes the waste of manual entry and it takes away a lot of the human error that we could see. And then next on top of that sometimes is the intelligent automation. So that is take is. It's basically like taking. So let's think about RPA as something as a small child and then the intelligent automation is starting to learn the different data points and then it starts to make simple, making simple tasks better but also making like questioning okay, which where do I send where right so making those decisions, making it like so for example, for when it comes to accounting, put out the data, they're doing all the data entry for accounting as things are coming in. But if someone's late sending out and you know, being able to say okay, this date has passed, someone hasn't paid something, so it sends something out out automatically. So that's a little bit of intelligent automation. And then the next step is of course and then you get into machine learning and AI where it's really starting to do a lot more processing, starting to make complex decisions based on the business. So that's where you have to have all of your business rules in, within the different systems in one area. So a business decision might be well this person is, you know, let's just say someone's traveling and instead of having an approval in a travel process, right having to go to a VP or manager to make that decision, maybe the system makes for that person. But if they are not able to or if there's an anomaly or something within that decision process, then it, then it goes to a human to interface with it. Those are just someone that's something as simple like that. So and then hyper automation, that's a new, that's a new term that's come out last year. Really what that is, it's more hyper automation. I think a lot of people get kind of get messed up with that, with this automation itself. Hyper automation is just more of a framework is the way I like to take a look at it. It's more of like taking continuous improvement and continually improving your technology but then also continually improving your process. So you're using process mining, you're using the gamble walks, you're using the process mapping because you have, just because you have a process map. The process maps are ever, should always be up right as we're moving along with it, with the technology. So hyper automation is really just, I think it's a framework. And then what it does, it helps connect the people, the process and technology together because you need to have all three in order to, in today's environment to have a successful organization.

Yeah. Hey, I'm curious to get your, your perspective. It's not exactly the same thing, but I think they're definitely related in some ways with this whole, you know, metaverse thing coming and, you know, one day we're all got our glasses on and we're watching a football game or whatever and you're, you know, talking to your significant other and they're like, are you talking to me or watching a game? You know, like, you know, like, what's your take on that, that whole movement? Do you think it's. That it's going to be significant or sort of just kind of pass by quietly? What's your thought on that?

It's, you know, I. The matter, the amount of stuff, I. It's. It's here and it's going to stay. I don't think it's going anywhere. Um, I think some of us, I'm, you know, I'm not a, I was never a big fan with the goggles because they make me a little dizzy, but I, I think there's a lot of room for it, for it to be there because it helps us with interaction. So, you know, you have. Zoom's been so great, right? Zoom or team or meetings or Microsoft meetings, any of that's been great. Especially in this day and age when we weren't able to connect physically. Yeah. So the meta universe, I think, is the same thing where we're going to have a lot of data process is kind of intermingled in those little areas, but then it gives you a chance to kind of meet people in person. It's here to stay.

I'm torn on it personally, because I'm.

So torn on it too. It's here to stay, but it's not. But I think there's, I think this is where the hybrid environment works out really well.

Exactly. And that's what we're seeing even coming out of the pandemic. You know, there's a huge desire for a lot of people to, to reconnect in person. Right. And, you know, so we're, we're seeing things here in, in our studio or in our training center here in Keller, Texas, where people wanting to come in and that's great. But we're also seeing that people understood that, boy, there's tremendous value on, you know, some more virtual related type activities. So sort of Blending them together, I think might be the. The sweet spot. Right.

It. It is, it is. I'm seeing that with a lot of my clients too. Right. So from a consulting perspective, or even training clients are. Or doing. So we don't have to be on site 100% of the time.

Yep.

Let's do a lot of prep work and then let's get on site and, you know, roll up our sleeves and get in there and do things for a week versus being there for five weeks.

Right, right. No, exactly, exactly. Good stuff. Good stuff. Well, hey, Lauren, this has been fun. Maybe let's wrap things up with maybe some practical advice or some tips that you might have for folks out there who are sort of thinking about this whole idea of process improvement and possibly combining some sort of automated solution or like, is there any practical ideas or tips you can give them?

Yeah, the first thing I would say, what's the business problem you're really trying to solve for? Start there. That's a good starting point. Is truly understanding what's truly going on and what are you trying to solve for. And then, of course, starting out, what does the current state look like? Mapping that out and then solving the problems for the current state and then developing that future state and mapping that out with a technology roadmap is key.

Perfect. And don't automate your waste.

Right, exactly. Do not automate your waste. Do not automate bad processes. That's why the current state is so important.

Yes, yes. Wonderful. All right, well, thanks again, Lauren, for coming back on. What's the best way for folks to connect with you? Social media, your website, anything like that?

Probably both. So you can find me on LinkedIn, laurenheisey. And then of course, my website, laurenhazeyconsulting.com is a good way to reach me as well.

Okay. And Heisey H I S E Y. Right. And yes, Lauren. Nothing crazy with Lauren, just. Just your normal Lauren. L A U R E N. That's right. All right, and we'll. We'll get everything linked up in the show notes so folks can check that out over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 426. So, yeah, thanks again, Lauren. It's been fun. And let's not wait another hundred and whatever it was episodes before we reconnect.

That sounds great. Thank you so much, Ron.

All right, take care. Thanks for listening. Whether you've been on the continuous improvement journey for many years or perhaps you're just getting started, Gemba Academy is here to support you. And while we're best known for our more than 1500 Lean and Six Sigma teaching and virtual tour videos. We also have a team of experienced Lean and Six Sigma practitioners available for one on one coaching as well as a variety of Lean and Six Sigma certification options. To learn more and to schedule a demo, head on over to gembaacademy.com.